1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an operating system for controlling man-machine interaction in an information processing system equipped with an interactive input-output unit, for graphic data processing. By way of example and, more particularly the invention relates, to a man-machine interface operating system which enables the flexible interactive graphic data processing operation of an input apparatus.
2. Description of the Prior Art
A computer-aided design system --a CAD SYSTEM-- is one of the exemplary information processing systems. In executing interactive command functions, such as interactive graphic processing, on a CAD system, data is processed by processing input data given by a pointing device, such as a mouse.
FIG. 1 is a functional block diagram of a conventional man-machine interface operating system. In FIG. 1, indicated at 1 is a command selecting unit, for example, of the menu style, for selecting a command to be executed, at 2 is a command branching unit, at 3a, 3b, . . . and 3e are command processing units, and at 4a, 4b, . . . and 4e are pointing device input units corresponding to the command processing units 3a, 3b, . . . and 3e, respectively. The command processing units 3a, 3b, . . . and 3e can be called individually.
In operation, first, a command --a processing function-- selected by the command selecting unit 1 invokes, for example, the processing unit 3a through the command branching unit 2 to execute command processing. Then, input data is given by the pointing device input unit 4a according to the contents of the process for each command processing function to execute processing. That is, the pointing device input unit 4a gives the input data in two steps of input operation, namely, a command selecting input operation and an input operation within each command.
The conventional man-machine interface operating system is described concretely in detail in "To analyze OS (operating system) of Macintosh (program name)", by Mizuo Nishibayashi, in which the operation program of the operation system is disclosed on NIKKEI BYTE, pp. 109, 111.
Since the conventional man-machine interface operating systems is thus constituted, when once the input mode is selected by a command, the pointing device needs to be operated for input operation to the last step according to the input sequence of the command (processing function). If the input operation of the command is interrupted, the command needs to be given again.